Creative Nonfiction – Page 2 – Appalachian Review

This American Fife

Jake Maynard ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo. —Mark Twain In 2007, bluegrass banjoist Eddie Adcock did an ordinary thing at an extraordinary time. Robbed of his ability to make music due to involuntary…

Excerpt from ‘Kin: A Memoir’

Shawna Kay Rodenberg ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Grand Marais, Minnesota, 1978-1979 Most mornings, the first sound I heard was either a mosquito, tinny in my ear, or the rusty springs of the rough-hewn door as it closed behind my father when he left to stoke the stoves in the other buildings or to wait tables in town.…

Old Woman at My Window

Elaine Neil Orr ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

It’s six a.m. on an April morning. I sit at my desk before the window, ready to write. The first thing I see are dogwood flowers. They appear suspended like lanterns over water. Eventually, tree branches come into view. I look down at my writing and when I look back…

Cattle Upon a Thousand Hills

Martha Grace Duncan ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

I. Barn Burning Wood and hay kin burn. —William Faulkner I was two-and-a-half years-old when I stood at the living room window with my very pregnant mother, watching our barn burn down. “I think you kind of enjoyed it,” she told me later. “The neighbors came and threw snowballs at the…

Keats In Your Time of Pandemic

Kathleen Driskell ♦

Summer 2020 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

You remember in Rome you stood in front of a facsimile of a remarkably narrow sleigh bed, a suggestion of the actual bed in which Keats died from consumption when he was twenty-five. What caught your attention were the ceiling carvings over the bed, and you studied them a long…

Where Have All the Safety Pins Gone?

Angela Jackson-Brown ♦

Summer 2020 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

2016 was the year of trauma. Prince died. Muhammad Ali died. Harper Lee died. The Pulse nightclub shooting occurred. Philando Castile was murdered by the police in front of his girlfriend and her four year old daughter. Donald Trump was elected president. Trauma. One trauma after another. My life has…

Secondhand Stories

Rebecca Hazelwood ♦

Spring 2020 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Most summer Saturday nights of my childhood, I snuggled in the crook of Granny Gracie’s bare legs, just the two of us watching The Golden Girls on the big box TV in her living room, taking lessons from Blanche Devereaux. When Blanche mentioned being as jumpy as a virgin at…

Scalpeen

Richard Hague ♦

Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

1 There is a racial memory by which the past is continually accumulated and preserved. —Henri Bergson, A New Philosophy Even before my father bought a remote parcel of brushy-up land in Appalachian Ohio’s Monroe County (which land and the people living around it has become a major source of…

What My Father Heard

Larry Bingham ♦

Summer 2019 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

My dad was twenty-five years old when he saw a man die. He didn’t hear or see the slate roof fall, but he heard Bonsell Robinson scream. It happened in 1967 inside the Beatrice Coal Mine in Keen Mountain, Virginia, where my dad worked. He was just starting out, five years…

Invasive

Catharina Coenen ♦

Issues, Spring 2019 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

What are these?” Judy asks. She bends way down, peers over the gold rims of her spectacles at something green beside the path. My eyes dash away from her, scan patch snow between silver trunks of beech and birch to find the dogs, team-digging for chipmunks by a stump. Clots…